How Did You Learn About Sex?

I remember the exact moment I learned about the birds and the bees. I was in the front seat of the station wagon with my mom. We were coming home from a hot summer day at the beach. Usually I just looked out the window at the beautiful Santa Monica mountains, wondering how so many plants could grow in one place. But dear old Mom was explaining how babies grow. That day I couldn't blame the twisty canyons for leaving my mind breathless and fuzzy.

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I was somewhere between ten and eleven years old, and while the sexual bombshell Mom dropped will be forever etched in my memory, my response to it will forever be etched in hers.

To this day she loves to tell the tale, through gales of laughter, how I looked at her, very seriously, and proclaimed, "You mean, it's like that television show Eight is Enough?"

(Sidenote to the under 30 crowd: This was a huge hit back in the 70's about a couple raising eight children.)

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My mom asked what sex had to do with a sitcom, and I responded, "You know, 'cause of the title.. Eight is Enough... that's enough of that stuff!"

Eventually I warmed up to the notion of sex. But unlike some girls at fourteen and fifteen, thinking was as far as it went. Reasons for my abstinence can be attributed to a variety of reasons:

1. My Catholic upbringing. (Guilt played into it more than I cared to admit.)

2. My education. (Books were more stimulating than a fourteen year old's penis - and certainly lasted a lot longer!)

3. Self-esteem. (I didn't need a boy to complete me. Though a date to the Freshman Christmas dance would have been nice. But no, not bitter. Not at all. I loved wearing the Elf Costume and passing out refreshments.)

4. Lack of self-esteem. (Subconsciously I figured that no boy would want to have sex with me despite examples 1 - 3. )

I have always held fast to these reasons (good or bad) for why I didn't have sex until I was much older, but it wasn't until a recent Oprah episode that I realized quite how much of my virginity I can attest to my mother.

In last week's episode,Oprah sat down with reknowned sex therapist Dr. Berman to talk about the right time to give the sex talk to your daughter. I What Dr. Berman said, over and over, was that it wasn't so much what a mom said but how open she was in discussing it that made all the difference. And while I'm not sure what I think about her ideas on giving young teens vibrators (the idea to let them explore sex themselves rather than experience pleasure for the first time in the hands of some uncaring boy) I do agree that the more a girl can communicate with the right person the less likely she'll get information from the wrong one. I always felt safe with my mom. I knew I could talk about anything. And talking, not doing, was what kept me protected from a lot of danger as a teen.

What about you? When did you first have your sex talk? And more of interest for this post, did you hear it from someone you trusted? And did it prevent you from making mistakes with the wrong person?